I told Jessica sixty days, which means I technically bought her an extra month before the board starts asking questions I can’t answer without revealing that I’m a lovesick idiot who’s been subsidizing his crush’s business for three years.
Questions like: Why have you been carrying this property at a loss?
Why did you personally intervene when the previous landlord tried to sell?
Why does your real estate development firm have a glaring blind spot for one specific bookstore owned by one specific woman with hazel eyes and a cat who likes you better than she does?
The answer, of course, is that I’m a fool of spectacular proportions. I’m in love with her. Have been since the first time I walked into The Fiction Nook two years ago for a “routine property inspection” and found her recommending a romance novel to a teenager with such genuine care that I forgot how to speak.
I’ve been using my position to protect her business while simultaneously pushing her away, because I’m a coward who doesn’t know how to reconcile the man I show the world with the man I actually am.
But I can’t tell Harold that.
“Dear Harold,” I mutter, drafting a response in my head. “The bookstore is underperforming because I’m emotionally compromised. Please adjust your spreadsheets accordingly. Best regards, your disaster of a business partner.”
Yeah. That’ll go over well.
I close the email and open a different file instead.
The manuscript.
The one I’ve been working on for six months, ever since J.A. Reads Romance told the world I’d lost my way. The one where I’m trying to write honestly for the first time in years, which mostly means I write three sentences, hate them, delete them, and then stare at the blinking cursor like it personally offended me.
The scene on the screen is barely coherent. But it’s also more real than anything I’ve published lately, which is either progress or evidence that my published work is truly terrible. Possibly both.
He watched her through the shop window, this woman who saw through every careful defense he’d built. She moved between the shelves like she was dancing, pulling books for customers with care like she was handling precious goods.
Which, he supposed, books were to her. Not just inventory, but stories with hope and connection.
Her eyes were hazel—brown in some lights, green in others, always changing, impossible to pin down, like trying to capture water in your hands.
He was standing outside her world, looking in, without deserving to enter but unable to walk away.
I close the file before I can read more and hate myself harder.
This is definitely not about Jessica.
This is a fictional character who happens to have hazel eyes and run a bookstore and make me feel like I’m standing outside a world I don’t deserve to enter.
Completely different.
I’m a professional.
There’s a knock on my front door.
I check my watch. Four-thirty. Right on schedule.
I lock the writing office with the speed of a serial killer hiding a body—which, emotionally speaking, I kind of am—and openthe front door to find Grayson Reed standing there with two cups of coffee and insufferably perceptive.
“You look terrible,” he says by way of greeting, pushing past me into the condo.
“Hello to you too. Please, come in. Make yourself at home. Don’t mind my fragile emotional state.”
“When’s the last time you slept?” Grayson hands me one of the coffees and settles onto my couch, which cost eight thousand dollars and is approximately as comfortable as sitting on a marble slab. I bought it because it looked impressive. I kept it because returning furniture felt like admitting defeat.
“I sleep.”
“For more than four hours?”
